Good, complicated stories

[Homicide13]

Heh, well as the creator of Nepsis, the best advice I can give you story wise is to make something that is important to yourself! A work of art is generally supposed to represent a meaning that the artist (or composer or director or whatever) wants to convey to his audience. Your story should be something that is important and meaningful to You, something that You want to convey to an audience - if it's not an idea or concept that is Yours you can't really put your heart behind it.

Of course that said, there are plenty of things you can keep in mind.

As far as the "amnesia" concept goes, there are plenty of ways to get around this problem - one being approach I used for Nepsis. The player doesn't forget his past, his past just isn't important to the story and so it is excluded. The player wakes up, finds a simple note explaining to the player why he is where he is, and then the story continues from there - only things that are essential to the player's understanding of the story are revealed to the player.

As far as planning goes, I would recommend you have the story generally planned out from beginning to end before you begin actually creating things game-wise. Of course it's impossible to know all the specifics, and things are very subject to change, but for example for Nepsis: When I started designing the game I knew that the player had to have taken such and such a potion that would have these certain effects (I knew that I wanted to use dimethyltryptamine as a medium which could be used to communicate with other life forms (ie other people) directly through their essence rather than through conventional means), and that the continuous use of the potion would eventually contort the player into a monster which could only be stopped through suicide. I then began making the levels (I didn't make the levels in the order in which they appeared either) keeping in mind what I wanted to come before and what I wanted to come after. In other words, I constructed the story as an entire element, rather than as just a series of levels where what comes next was only really decided upon completion of the previous level, which is a trap I think a lot of inexperienced writers fall in to. (It would be like if JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series without thinking about what she wanted to her next book to include.)

Anyways, I hope that helps some. A lot of it is just stuff that you learn from experience.